Music

On A Quiet Afternoon

During the dim, dark days of the young year, as afternoon slips quietly into night, sit under an opened kilt in the chair by the window and watch the westerly wind spill clouds across the sky. Take a deep breath, pull on your ear goggles and let Sleeper Service take you on an adventure.

On their second album, the found sounds that marked Sleeper Service’s first year have taken a back seat to serried ranks of synthesisers. At times lush layers, at times boisterous bleeps, they frame each song, providing the space for a network of guitars, bass and drums, that nod towards metal and hold hints of krautrock.

The album opens with Free Jazz Mechanic, the most stripped-back track on the album. From a delicate beginning, it builds towards a frantic freak out middle, before fully finding its legs and then returning to its opening quietude.

After its track-pad clicks drop away, Milk Sandwich tries to be like those funky tunes named after soul foods, but it never quite makes it. Guitars take over and gradually pull the song towards the reaches of rock.

Waiting by the Edge of the Moon is a watching song, eyes tight, glancing, aware of its surroundings. Something sinister stirs, perhaps, too, an unexpected voice.

The rhythmic scrape of broken glass over hard rock drums and twin guitars usher in Under The Watchful Gaze (We Await Our Doom), the hardest-driving track on the album. It’s a song of breaks, of drops and returns, of stumbles and starts and stops and, through it all, a relentless drive that hammers on and on.

Next up, we rise early in the morning to get on the road, to get to the hills. We climb with anticipation, yet at Three Thousand Feet the skyline ahead is revealed as only another ridge and so we climb on, what lies ahead is unseen.

The well-oiled lines of Abaddon Half Track, a machine, rail-affixed, metronomic, electronic, will give way to the deep-toned darkness of metal in the end.

The Tale Of The Owl is a story in three parts. It begins with the staccato beat of war, eighty years distant, as stark a beginning as life can provide. The severity yields in part two to the sweet promises of tomorrow, to the promises of all our tomorrows, promises of things to come and things that will never be. But the promises slowly fade and reality dawns in minor chords, the third part of our tale. Under that reality, however, a bass theme develops that brings resolution and, finally, acceptance. In the end, you get a lifetime. No more, no less.

For Ruby.

January 2020

Sings For Yer Hogmanay

Hogmanay micht be the maist Scottish nicht o the year. It's a nicht for tae luik forward tae the year aheid, an tae mind the yin feenisht. It's a nicht o celebratin an a nicht o music. So whit better way tae merk it than wi some guid auld Scots sangs?

Oreeginally a pro-Jacobite sang, the first o three Rabbie Burns sangs here wis altert by the bard in 1794. Charlie Is My Darlin yince celebratit yon Bonnie Prince. Burns instead leuks at the merry an tragic dance he led his country oan.

Hamish Henderson scrieved Freedom Come Aa Ye in 1960, as an anti-imperialist sang. It taks an unromantic view o Scotland's history in empire, an howps for a kynder future.